With the World Cup starting tomorrow, field hockey opens a decisive year ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games

The men’s field hockey game that starts tomorrow Friday is one of the 34 World Championships in Olympic sports that will take place during 2023. And although it is not a qualifier for Paris 2024, the tournament is essential for the international filming of the selected teams who will seek the first Olympic places this year in the different continental tournaments.

As in 2018, the Kalinga Stadium in Bhubaneswar, on the east coast of India and with capacity for 16 thousand spectators, will be the main house of the best hockey on the planet. In this edition, the city of Rourkela also joins the Birsa Munda International Stadium, located 300 kilometers from the headquarters and with a capacity for 21,000 people.

In its more than 50-year history and 14 editions -the first in 1971-, the men’s hockey world championships cannot be narrated without mentioning Pakistan, the champions of the inaugural edition and also the team that has won the most World Cups, with four trophies. However, the traditional national team in the green shirt will not be in this World Cup edition, a fact that is not surprising if you look at the last 10 years, but that continues to cause some melancholy in the followers of the discipline.

Belgium is today the great candidate without a doubt. Defenders of the world title and the last Olympic champions, they share Group B with Germany, the Republic of Korea and Japan, which reappears in a World Cup after 17 years. The Red Lions are led by the Dutchman Michel van den Heuvel and have some of the best players in the world, such as Arthur Van Doren, Victor Wegnez, Felix Denayer, Florent Van Aubel, John-John Dohmen, Alexander Hendrickx, Arthur de Sloover and Tom Boon.

The ever-candidate Australia, a finalist in the 2018 World Cup, will seek to win its fourth World Cup title to be joined by Pakistan as the two most winners in the history of men’s field hockey. In the post-Olympic season, the Aussies took advantage of 2022 to win their seventh gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. In Odisha 2023, they will be part of Group A together with Argentina, Olympic champion in Rio 2016; France, the revelation of the 2018 World Cup; and South Africa.

Another team with three world championship stars, the last one in 1998, is the Netherlands, which will compete in Group C alongside New Zealand, Malaysia and newcomer Chile. Under the orders of head coach Jeroen Delmee, who took over in 2021, the orange team is going through an important generational change. The youngsters took up the challenge in style, winning 12 of their 16 games in the 2021-22 edition of the FIH Hockey Pro League to win the title for the first time.

Group D will be made up of the host country, along with England, Spain and Wales. India, which despite having been Olympic champion eight times was only world champion in 1975, hopes to take advantage of the venue this time and perform better than its quarter final defeat against the Netherlands in the 2018 edition. England comes to Odisha with high hopes of improving fourth place in their last participation. The closest it came to winning a World Cup was in 1986, losing 2-1 to Australia in the final.

The competition format will be the same as the one used in the Spain-Netherlands 2022 Women’s Hockey World Championship. The four winners from each group advance directly to the quarterfinals. Meanwhile, the last four from each zone will be eliminated. Those selected who finish second and third must play an extra instance to access the quarterfinals, where they will cross paths with the four that had already qualified in the first phase.